Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, studying the psychological development of teenage girls in 1988, found that they experience a major drop in self-esteem as they reach adolescence. Only 29 percent of teenage girls said that they "felt happy the way I am," as opposed to 60 percent of nine-year-old girls. Gilligan suggests that this adolescent crisis in confidence is due to the conflict between the image that a girl has of herself and what society tells her a woman should be like. Seventeen, the most widely read magazine among teenage girls in the United States, claims to "encourage independence" and help […]

News or Nikes?

The increasing tendency of television throughout the '80s to exploit young viewers reached some kind of breakthrough with Whittle Communications' Channel One. For the uninitiated, Channel One is a television news program targeted to teenagers, and beamed to school classrooms around the country via satellite. Whittle offers this program to school systems, along with the equipment to receive the program (one satellite receiver, plus two VCRs and one 19" television set per classroom), in return for the school system agreeing to require students to view the program every day. The 12-minute program consists of 10 minutes of news and two […]